Metaphor and Literalism in Buddhism: The ... - misterdanger.net

NIRVANA IN THE THERAVf DA BUDDHIST TRADITION
The Unanswered questions and the fire image in the early UpaniLads
A set of questions asked by Vacchagotta have been known as avyAkata.
Murti, in his book The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, has translated it as
‘The Inexpressibles’ 26 in accordance with his interpretation of these questions
as ‘a parallel with the Kantian antinomies’. 27 This translation is not
correct literally because vyAkata is the past passive participle of vyAkaroti,
meaning ‘explain or answer’. The proper interpretation of avyAkata should
be, as pointed out by Jayatilleke, ‘unexplained or unanswered’. 28
The set of ten or fourteen unanswered questions can be classified into
four main categories. The four topics are whether the world is eternal, whether
the world is finite, whether the soul ( jCva or Atman) is the same as the body
(sarCra) and the state of the TathAgata after death. Each issue consists of
two or four alternatives: affirmative and negative for the two, or affirmative,
negative, both and neither for the four.
For instance, the four sets for the last category are: ‘the TathAgata exists
after death’, ‘the TathAgata does not exist after death’, ‘the TathAgata does
and does not exists after death’ and ‘the TathAgata neither exists nor does
not exist after death’. In the set of ten only the last topic, the state of the
TathAgata after death, has four alternatives, whereas in the set of fourteen
all the topics except the third one, the soul as body, have four alternatives.
Although Jayatilleke has relied largely on the set of ten, found in the Pali
canon, 29 the set of fourteen appears not only in the Sanskrit literature 30 but
also in the Chinese equivalent 31 of the Pali suttas 32 with the set of ten unanswered
questions. That is to say, the Pali could be the only canon in which
the unanswered questions enumerate ten.
There have been many attempts to solve the problems surrounding these
unanswered questions. 33 Main concerns can be of two kinds: whether the
Buddha knew the answers to these questions, and on what grounds these
questions were not answered. When it comes to our topic, the state of the
TathAgata after death, they are: whether the Buddha accepts a certain state
reachable by an enlightened one after death and on what grounds he wants
this question to remain unanswered.
While Jayatilleke, taking a logical positivist position, seems to accept the
existence of a transcendental state realisable after death yet considers that
it is unanswered because this state is indescribable or logically meaningless,
34 Kalupahana, from an empiricist point of view, rejects the existence of
such a state on the same ground as the rejection of the UpaniLadic conception
of Atman and explains the silence of the Buddha as his awareness of the
limitations of empiricism. 35 I think that the silence of the Buddha on this
particular question could largely be responsible for his new way of thinking,
thinking according to the cause (yoniso manasikAra), if we consider how the
metaphor of a fire extinguished was used in the dialogue between the Buddha
and Vacchagotta.
55